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Virtualizing Cuts Web App Performance 43%

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the price-to-pay dept.

czei writes "This just-released research report, Load Testing a Virtual Web Application, looks at the effects of virtualization on a typical ASP Web application, using VMWare on Linux to host a Windows OS and IIS web server. While virtualizing the server made it easier to manage, the number of users the virtualized Web app could handle dropped by 43%. The article also shows interesting graphs of how hyper-threading affected the performance of IIS." The report urges readers to take this research as a data point. No optimization was done on host or guest OS parameters.

2 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Virtualize this by Fordiman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I do like the idea of a variably sized beowulf cluster running a floating number of package (LAMP) servers. Get more clients? Add more VLAMPs. Things slowing down? Add more hardware.

    You still take performance hits, but if you can scale your system by just adding cheap commodity systems, that works. Plug it in, boot it off a CD, and let the Cluster take control.

    --
    110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
  2. This has been my experience too by SCHecklerX · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Linux under VMWare's network performance is pretty bad. An interesting visual confirmation is to use an ssh shell and watch the lag. That may just be the broadcom chips in the servers the company I was working for used, though. Guest OSes are fine for some low traffic stuff that only a few people will be using, and is definitely the way to go in the test lab; but I wouldn't use this configuration as a company's primary reverse proxy or mail solution.

    That said,
    I use a windows vmware session under linux for those times I have no choice, and it works just fine network-wise as a workstation.